[ המלצה מאת Cristina Beretta ] ‘I don’t know how to feel embarrassed, don’t know how to blush, or how to make my voice sound more timid or my vocal cords tremble a bit. My heartbeat is steady and even. It only goes faster when I exert myself physically.’ He loves to see others suffer, but he isn’t a sadist, because ‘sadism is a complicated matter, one constantly requiring commitment and an extremely calculated effort’, and of this he is not capable.  The first person narrator immediately gets these things straight, even before introducing himself. He is Matteo Carnevale, a thirty-year-old man, who is incapable of feeling pain or affection, who knows neither remorse nor guilt. People are inclined to read whatever they want into his polite smile precisely because there’s nothing behind it. For him, smiling is not a means of communicating with others – for ultimately it appears he doesn’t have much to communicate.  After receiving his degree in political science, Matteo happens to meet Filippo on a train ride from Apulia back to Rome. Filippo falls in love with Matteo and offers him a job in his family’s funeral parlour, where he is responsible for putting make-up on the corpses. Tempted by the idea of a discrete, secluded, and anonymous workplace, Matteo accepts the offer, saying it’s ‘a secure and stable job, because people will surely be dying for years to come’.   At the funeral of his father, who was crushed to death in the car park of a big department store by the weight of a table he had just bought, Matteo encounters Claudia, a femme fatale, and Alberto, her husband-to-be. Claudia seduces Matteo, who then becomes entangled in a strange affair revolving around interminable nightly monologues on the phone and sadomasochistic practices. Matteo quickly becomes the central point of reference for the people in this paradoxical microcosm: Claudia falls in love with him, and wants to cancel her wedding and make herself his forever. Filippo starts making unrealistic suggestions for a future together, like taking on light jobs in a luxury hotel. At the same time, Matteo is developing more and more into the son the funeral parlour’s owners (Filippo’s parents) have always wanted.  Yet Matteo shrugs off all their warped expectations without one iota of guilt. ‘Deluding yourself has never alleviated suffering and feeling guilty has never cleansed a conscience. [...] I’m not so pretentious as to believe I can influence the happiness or unhappiness of my peers. I am a fool among other fools who are convinced they have found what’s sacred in their obsessions.’ But then, as Matteo begins to pull the strings more and more in this tangle of Eros, Thanatos, fellatio, sadism, masochism and Oedipus, he undergoes a change. In an unexpected finale, he transforms - from the ‘basket case’ he had appeared to be - to the only authentic person in the novel. What fascinates me most about this book is the illusion of transparency that the author has succeeded in giving to what is actually an obscure and perverse web of relationships. You might even say that Claudia’s sadomasochistic activities or the daily oral services demanded at the funeral parlour are less perverse than the falseness of the people surrounding Matteo Carnevale. Veronica Raimo has successfully translated reality into words and, by filtering it through a paradoxical and grotesque viewpoint, turned it into a dense, complete, and direct novel. From a psychological perspective, she has analysed her characters perfectly, though without resorting to psychologisms. And the entire story is told in an original language that is rich in imagery, and very personal in style. 

[ מידע על ספרים ] Raimo, Veronica: Il dolore secondo Matteo. (original language: Italian) Minimum fax, 2007 . ISBN: 978-88-7521-138-7.